AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HELLCRASH — “MARK OF THE BEAST”

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Apr 302025
 

(written by Islander)

We had an album review earlier today that compared the band’s music to a dish prepared by a Michelin-starred chef. What’s coming next is like a horde of exultant demons blasting through those restaurant doors on full-throttle Harleys and blow-torching all the diners for the greater glory of Satan.

Sedate and sophisticated or inventively avant-garde, this is is not. It’s hell-raising heavy metal, evil and electrifying to the core, pure-grade adrenaline served through the ears. But that doesn’t mean this sulfurous song is slap-dash or sloppy — far from it. It deserves its own chef’s kiss (along with a fuckload of horns thrown to the sky).

What we’re talking about, as you can see, is a song named “Mark of the Beast” from the devil-spawned Italian rampagers in Hellcrash. It’s off their third album Inferno Crematörio, which is set for release on May 23rd by Dying Victims Productions, and we’re presenting it through a lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WALD KRYPTA — “OF DISENCHANTMENT”

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Apr 292025
 

(written by Islander)

On May 30th the Eternal Death label will release a new album by the Canadian/American duo Wald Krypta. Entitled Disenchantment, it’s the band’s fourth full-length.

Around here, this has been an eagerly anticipated album, because in their previous releases Wald Krypta have found for themselves an intriguing musical intersection. They are rightly known for the “raw” lo-fi aesthetics of their sound, but their songwriting really doesn’t fit the current template of “raw black metal”.

Whereas that songwriting template often seems calculated to be willfully abusive of listeners… and therefore often dull and uninspiring… Wald Krypta electrify the imagination, even when what their songs might cause us to imagine are very dark and dangerous visions. Their music has compelling emotional power, which the organic rawness of their sound just makes more authentic.

They show this again within Disenchantment, and we have two vivid signs of that so far, one song that has already been revealed and another we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PUTRIDITY — “MORS MATER NOSTRA”

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Apr 292025
 

(written by Islander)

Today we’re facilitating an event that’s the sonic equivalent of detonating a dirty bomb in a crowded downtown thoroughfare. But instead of radioactive material, this bomb is packed with nails, viscera, and bone fragments, all expanding at the pace of a blast front.

What we’re presenting is the first song to be violently discharged from Morbid Ataraxia, a no-holds-barred new album by the Italian brutal death metal band Putridity in advance of its June 27 release by Willowtip Records. As you can see, we’re also revealing the album’s ghastly cover painting, prepared by the fiendishly talented Paolo Girardi. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: EXCOMMUNICATIO — “KONFINATION – DISCIPLES OF THE LIGHT”

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Apr 282025
 

(written by Islander)

With phenomenal cover art by Eliran Kantor paving the way, on May 2nd Vendetta Records will release a split entitled MANDATUM by two striking black metal bands — Excommunicatio (Germany) and Beenkerver (Netherlands). The split includes three new songs by each band, and today we’re premiering a lyric video for one of the three by Excommunicatio.

For Excommunicatio the split follows up their 2023 debut album Kodex Luzifer, which we reviewed here. The review included these thoughts:

To be sure, the album is relentlessly hellish, just as the vocals are relentlessly spine-tingling in their demonic intensity, but the album takes us on a tour — because this vision of hell is not all one place. As rendered in these songs, it is ruled by magisterial haughtiness and cold cruelty, but the lords also exult in their un-ruled excesses and their displays of burning glory, and they war on heaven too. In this infernal pageant we also tour ghettos of suffering and the wandering of lost souls in desolation.

What new hells do the Excommunicatio duo open for us on the split? We envision one of them through “Konfination – Disciples of the Light.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BYONOISEGENERATOR — “UVB-76”

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Apr 282025
 

(written by Islander)

If the Russian maniacs in Byonoisegenerator churned out records at the usual velocity of their music, they’d have released about 1,000 albums by now. But the pace of their releases has been much slower. First came Turbulent Biogenesis in 2015 (available here), then Neuromechanica in 2018 (reviewed here at our site), and now, seven years later, we’re going to get a third album, Subnormal Dives. It’s set for discharge on June 13th via Transcending Obscurity Records.

That seven-year wait means that many (most?) people trespassing on our site today will likely have no idea what they’re about to hear. This is a good thing. Being unprepared for what Byonoisegenerator are doing now makes it more likely that listeners’ heads will explode, and it’s fun to imagine that.

Some people do have an idea, because Byonoisegenerator released a video single about a year ago (a song named “5mgInspiredVibes” that’s included as a bonus track on the new record), and more recently Transcending Obscurity has released two other songs from Subnormal Dives. Today we’ve bringing a third one, “UVB-76“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPYT — “FRÅN MELANKOLI TILL MENINGSLÖSHET”

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Apr 252025
 

(Andy Synn steps in as a last minute substitute to host our premiere of the new album by Dispyt)

Up until about… let’s call it 24 hours ago… I thought I was done writing here for the week.

Unfortunately our great and glorious leader – who was originally intending to share his thoughts about Från melankoli till meningslöshet, the upcoming third album by filthy Finnish riff-mongers Dispyt (out 29 April) – ran into a few difficulties and was struggling to find time to put his thoughts into words here for us all to gorge upon.

And so, heroically and without hesitation, I volunteered my services… after all, I’ve been a fan of the band ever since I stumbled across their debut album, Den ständigt närvarande ångesten, more years ago than I care to think about, so who better to give them their due?

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CHANGELING — “CHANGELING”

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Apr 242025
 

(written by Islander)

We don’t need to be mind-readers to fathom why Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger named his new project and its debut album Changeling. Like the legend from European folklore, it has the musical presence of a supernatural shape-shifter whose diabolical essence diverged from the shapes that disguised it in place of the humans spirited away — except there’s no real disguise here, because the music strikingly and abundantly seems well beyond the capabilities of base-level humans.

Changeling is an entirely fitting name, but Fountainhead might also have chosen the name Phileas Fogg, the adventurous creation of Jules Verne who accepted a wager to go Around the World in Eighty Days. That idea comes to mind because the album, in its many changing escapades, in some ways does seem like a globe-spanning, head-spinning tour by ground, air, water, and subterranean passages, spanning different cultures, different sights, and different dangers.

Except this grand tour will only take you an hour, an hour very well spent, as you’ll discover today through our complete premiere of Changeling in advance of its April 25th release by Season of Mist. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OMINOUS RUIN — “ETERNAL”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

After a run of short releases beginning in 2011, the Bay Area band Ominous Ruin released a debut album in 2021 via Willowtip Records, Amidst Voices That Echo in Stone, that quickly attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. As our own DGR wrote in his NCS review, “The band’s sound is one of multiple extreme genres in all-out combat with each other, fully unloading from the hyperactive Tech Death scene even as it drains the arsenal from a very Brutal Death inspired segment as well.” But he also highlighted the even further progressions that the album included as it moved forward, becoming more labyrinthine, more ominous, more unpredictable.

And now Ominous Ruin are returning, again on the Willowtip label, with their sophomore album Requiem. No less technically impressive or brutally bludgeoning than their debut, it nevertheless represents a noticeable evolution, providing an even more expansive array of sensations and moods (including ambient and acoustic passages) in a way that makes the album even more emotionally involving — and mind-bending — than their first one.

This was evident in the first video/single off the album, “Staring Into the Abysm,” and today we have further compelling evidence in our premiere of Ominous Ruin‘s video for the song “Eternal“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BRÜKA — “ENVY THE LIFELESS”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Last September the Central Texas black metal band Brüka released their debut album Death’s Promise in cooperation with Khaoszophy Records and Pest Productions. Usually powered by viscerally propulsive rhythms and fronted by scalding vocal ferocity, it provides a twisting and turning experience.

At times the album provides sweeping melodic ice-storms in the vein of Dissection and Emperor, bleak and daunting but expansive, creating keyboard-enhanced soundscapes that engulf listeners, albeit with attention-grabbing bass nuances and vivid drum variations. At other times, the music attacks with barbaric savagery and monstrous death-metal roars, with maniacally boiling fretwork and earth-shaking cannonades.

At still other times, Brüka let the music extravagantly ring (and warp) like hellish and hallucinatory chimes or to become soft, mysterious, and elegantly haunting before exploding in feral and fierce attacks.

And then there’s the song “Envy the Lifeless“, which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today and a vivid sign of just how varied Death’s Promise is. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: POSTMORTAL — “DECAY OF PARADISE”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Funeral doom is a venerable but narrow musical niche, now old enough to be well-established and highly regarded by its adherents, but many caverns below anything that would pass as “popular”, even among most fans of extreme metal.

The signature tropes of the sub-genre are by now well-known: long song-lengths, glacial pacing, abyssal atmospheres of sprawling scale, often titanic heaviness, often monstrous vocals equally abyssal in depth. Of course there are variations: trappings of spectral elegance and haunting beauty; singing instead of growling; the occasional roaring upheavals instead of the slow, quaking pace of massed mourners or wounded giants. Sometimes you might even hear whispers of hope, like tiny moths drawn to a candle that will be found dead by morning.

Where does the Polish funeral doom band Postmortal fit within this old and deep but narrow musical crevasse? Early signs appeared in their Soil EP in 2018, but the lineup has changed since then, diminishing to the duo of lyricist/vocalist Dawid Dunikowski and musician Michał Skupień. Current signs are available in the debut album made by these two, Profundis Omnis, which re-states some of the band’s early compositions and is now set for release on May 9th by the UK label Aesthetic Death. Continue reading »

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